Good morning. Another week means another industry disrupted by Amazon.com Inc. This time it’s the suppliers that sell the light switches, hydraulic valves, and other industrial parts to businesses and individuals like plumbers, electricians and contractors. Through its B2B marketplace offering, which Amazon said last month had one million customers, the e-commerce behemoth joins a host of online sellers shaking up the roughly $130 billion U.S. market for the items that keep factories humming and the plumbing working, luring customers with lower prices and perks like one-click ordering and free delivery, the Journal’s Brian Baskin and Laura Stevens report.

“Amazon is shaking up the traditional format for selling industrial parts by allowing distributors and manufacturers to sell products directly to businesses on its marketplace, eliminating middlemen and often undercutting traditional local suppliers,” they write. It’s a daunting challenge for the traditional parts supply business, which largely is still conducted via salespeople working out of local shops or national distributors that cater to large businesses.

Distributors are fighting back, cutting prices and working to improve their e-commerce offerings as they rethink how to deliver their products and services in the digital age. Many distributors have offered next-day delivery for decades and are experts in fulfilling orders quickly. Some traditional companies also offer extra services, such as custom parts or working off a customer’s blueprints to determine parts needed, which could require significant investment for Amazon to match. Nevertheless, Amazon has a long history of disrupting industries, and is sure to be a formidable foe. “Industrial suppliers risk getting caught in a race to the bottom on prices, where online-only sellers have an advantage because they don’t maintain costly networks of branch offices and salespeople,” the Journal reports. Read the full story here.

UPS turns to VR to train truck drivers. United Parcel Service Inc. will begin using virtual reality to train new drivers before they hit the road. Headsets made by HTC Corp. will hit all nine of the company’s UPS Integrated training centers next month, with a goal of training 4,000 drivers using the simulated driving experience by 2018, CIO Journal’s Sara Castellanos reports. “Through this technology, we’ll be able to immerse our UPS drivers and service providers in all kind of situations that will get them to think about safety and reacting to safety hazards … in much more effective ways,” CIO Juan Perez says.

Building a business case for blockchain adoption. To make our digital infrastructures more secure and efficient, blockchain needs more development in key areas including standards, applications and governance, CIO Journal Columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger writes. For companies ready to embrace the not-quite-ready-for-primetime technology now, internet strategies employed two decades ago could serve as a guide.

TECHNOLOGY NEWS

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Eclipse fever grows. Today's expected total solar eclipse is both a business and a big data opportunity. Citizen scientists are crowdsourcing data about animal behavior during the event, writes the Journal’s Daniela Hernandez. Roughly 200 million people live within a day’s drive of the so-called path of totality—the 70-mile-wide swath cutting across 14 states from Oregon to South Carolina where the sky will go completely dark. Nearly twice as many will be able to view at least a partial eclipse, according to National Aeronautics and Space Administration. One bank spent $10,000 on viewing glasses to hand out to customers. Such glasses are sold out at many online outlets but videos of how to create pinhole viewers from colanders and cereal boxes are getting a lot of traffic. On social media, Snap Inc. offers special filters for users sharing eclipse photos. Consult our 90-second guide to viewing the eclipse safely. As Bruce Springsteen put it, "Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun."

Wal-Mart’s battle with Amazon takes to the skies. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has applied for a U.S. patent for a floating warehouse that could make deliveries via drones, bringing products from the aircraft down to shoppers’ homes, Bloomberg reports. The blimp-like machine would fly at heights between 500 and 1,000 feet and be operated autonomously or by a remote human pilot. Amazon.com Inc. was granted a patent for a similar vessel in April 2016.

Blackberry’s turnaround fizzles. Shares of the Toronto-based business software maker have been falling from their more than two-year high hit in June as lackluster earnings and competitive threats raise doubts about the firm’s turnaround prospects, Reuters reports. “It’s been a turnaround story now for about five years,” Joel Kulina, a technology-sector market maker for Wedbush Securities tells the news service. “People don’t have the patience.”

China launches ‘cyber-court’ for internet-related cases. The Hangzhou Internet Court opened Friday and heard its first case, a copyright infringement dispute between an online writer and a web company, the BBC writes. Legal agents accessed the court via their computers and the trial lasted 20 minutes. The first case was presented on a large screen, where defendants and plaintiffs appeared before the judge via video chat.

Google searches for ways to boost news subscriptions. Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit is working on tools to help news organizations sell subscriptions, a move that could help ease its strained relationship with publishers. The tech giant said it’s testing changes to its “first-click-free” policy that allows access via Google search results to articles that require a subscription, the Journal’s Jack Nicas reports. Google is also testing tools such as sharing data on which users are likely to buy subscriptions and using its online-payments system for subscriptions.

Wanted: Infosys CEO ready for war. Infosys Ltd. begins the search for Vishal Sikka’s replacement with a tough set of requirements for any candidate, Bloomberg writes. The person must be able to lead a 200,000-employee organization, willing to tackle massive changes to the outsourcing industry and brave enough to join the firm amid open warfare between the firm’s board and co-founders. Open hostilities may make it difficult to lure top candidates from outside the company.

Your face is the key. A handful of laptops and mobile devices can now read facial features, and the technique is about to get a boost from specialized hardware small enough to fit into mobile phones, writes the Journal’s Christopher Mims. Depth-sensing technology, generally called “structured light,” is advancing at chip-maker Qualcomm Inc., and Apple Inc. is said to be experimenting with similar technology. Structured light sprays thousands of tiny infrared dots across a person’s face or any other target, allowing a device’s camera to gather depth information.

Mobile games rethink ads. King Digital is testing mobile game ads in a new format, opening a revenue stream Wall Street analysts think could hit $1 billion by 2019. King Digital earlier this year began tests of ads from Nestle SA, Visa Inc. and others in a handful of mobile games including “Candy Crush Soda,” writes the Journal’s Sarah E. Needleman. Ads embedded into games as an optional experience that players can choose in exchange for rewards could be a torrent of revenue. This year, mobile games are on track to generate $39.8 billion in ad revenue world-wide, up almost 90% from $21.1 billion in 2015, according to App Annie Inc., an app data and analytics firm. It projects the number will climb to $49 billion in 2018.

Alipay, WeChat fight for mobile payments dominance overseas. China’s tech titans are expanding into foreign markets, signing partnerships with merchants in Southeast Asia and Europe and looking to invest in payment systems in other countries, reports Chuin-Wei Yap in the Journal. Ant Financial Services Group, an affiliate of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., owns Alipay, which lets customers pay for everything from haircuts to houses via codes generated on their smartphones. Tenpay from Tencent Holdings Ltd. is a big rival and attached to chat service WeChat. Both are following customers abroad as 120 million Chinese tourists visit Europe and other destinations each year. Ant is also pursuing the acquisition of MoneyGram International Inc. for $1.2 billion.

Immelt close to becoming Uber CEO. Former General Electric Co. chairman Jeff Immelt has become the front-runner candidate to lead Uber Technologies Inc., sources with knowledge of the situation tell Recode. A majority of the board is coalescing around the experienced executive, but sources say that could change, and that there are two other executives still being considered, neither of whom is a woman. Uber’s directors are likely to vote within the next few weeks, Recode reports.

EVERYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW

First round of NAFTA talks reveals friction, including over Trump's proposal for U.S.-made auto parts. (WSJ)

CEOs were cautiously optimistic in January that the president’s policy goals were their own. Then came the travel ban, Paris, and Charlottesville. Can the relationship be rebuilt? (WSJ)

Jerry Lewis, a frantic funnyman with a knack for broad comedy, died at 91. (WSJ)

The Morning Download is edited today by Kim S. Nash and cues up the most important news in business technology every weekday morning. Send us your tips, compliments and complaints. You can get The Morning Download emailed to you each weekday morning by clicking http://wsj.com/TheMorningDownload.